Many researchers over the years have attempted to create spatial maps of emotional states in an attempt to better characterize and understand human emotion.
“Emotions and Facial Expressions” by Joumana Medlej (Cedarseed.com, 2007) is a two-dimensional model of the author's perceived relationships between five families of emotional expression (sadness, anger, smile, surprise and relaxation). The model is constructed as forked branches radiating from a central “blank” state, following no apparent meaningful vector, and extending to the extremities of each of the five branches. The diagram consists of 59 emotional states, depicted both verbally and visually.
Robert Plutchik's “Wheel of Emotions” (1980) is a two-dimensional model presenting 8 basic emotions as the core of a radial diagram (ecstasy, admiration, terror, amazement, grief, loathing, rage and vigilance) with each radius extending through two diminishing degrees of each emotion. Interposed between the 8 radial spokes are 8 “advanced” emotions (love, submission, awe, disapproval, remorse, contempt, aggressiveness and optimism), each being defined as the fusion of the basic emotions on either side. A three dimensional version of the wheel has also been published, with the wheel being folded into the form of a cone; but the conical version squeezes out the advanced emotions and creates three-dimensional discontinuities along the newly formed linear axis. The wheel consists of 32 emotional states, depicted verbally, 24 of which have a uniform radial distribution within the chart.
An “Emotional States” diagram, found on Humaine Association's www.emotional-research.net and attributed to Klaus Scherer et al, University of Geneva (no date), is a two-dimensional model with a stochastic distribution of emotional states. Four axes (active-passive, positive-negative, hi power control-lo power control, obstructive-conducive) cut through the circular chart, suggesting eight regions of equal size, though the regions carry no specified designations. The chart lists 111 emotional states, depicted verbally, though with some redundancy and several apparent contradictions (presumably due to transcription).
Designing Sociable Robots (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents series) by Cynthia Breazeal (2004) provides the only truly three-dimensional model—but includes only 10 very basic emotional states. This 3D “emotion space” was constructed for a study at MIT to allow a robotic face, “Kismet,” to express emotions. The 10 emotions include the psychologist Paul Ekman's Six Basic Emotions (described as universal his 1972 study of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, seeking to determine if facial expression was cultural or innate)—anger, disgust, fear, happiness (called “content” in the MIT study), sadness and surprise—plus four others—stem, accepting, tired and calm. The model was constructed to integrate the functions of the servo motors controlling the robotic face and provide fluidity in the mechanical transitions between facial expressions (so as not to disturb the child subjects interpreting them). The servos performed essentially three functions, controlling three variables of motion—defined as valence, arousal and stance. The polar extremes of these functions define the three axes of the emotion space: “happy” and “unhappy” define the valence axis, “tired” and “surprise” define the arousal axis, and “stern” and “accepting” define the stance axis. The nexus of these three axes is the zero point, which yields a neutral expression, labeled “calm.” Only three states lie off-axis (with their precise metrics undefined in the report) to show any interaction between variables: “disgust” (low arousal, closed stance, negative valence), “anger” (high arousal, closed stance, negative valence) and “fear” (high arousal, open stance, negative valence). The 10 emotional states are, for practical purposes, depicted.
While such systems for creating spatial maps of emotional states exist, no systems are known by the inventors which provide an interactive graphic software interface to navigate to an image representative of any particular emotion from within a matrix containing representations of a continuous range of emotional states, to allow a user to communicate emotions or to tag or rate various things with emotional significance, so that quantitative statistics on emotional significance can be computed for those things.
A variety of systems exist for very limited communication of emotion through limited bandwidth connections. These involve the use of emoticons, or emoji, which are highly abstracted iconifications of particular discrete emotions. Such systems range from widely-known user messaging conventions such as using the character sequence to represent a smiling face, or ;-) to represent a winking and smiling face, to systems like the Skype VOIP and chatting software package, which provides a palette of emoticon images that the user can place into messages.
Such systems are limited in that they at least do not provide the capability to interactively navigate through a series of images intended to represent a scientifically-valid multidimensional continuum covering the full breadth of emotional feelings.
Systems exist for allowing large numbers of users to tag places, people and things with ratings of various types. A few examples of such systems include such geospatial rating systems as Yelp, Google Maps, and Foursquare. These existing systems are limited in that they at least do not provide the user with an interactive graphic software interface to navigate to an image representative of any particular emotion from within a matrix containing representations of a continuous range of emotional states.